I’ll tell you about my journey in earnest.
We all need to start a digital business in 2024. Having a digital business gives you the freedom to experience something new all the while you learn about so many different aspects of running a business.
This is the reason why I started selling Notion templates. I wanted to explore where I could take this business with little to no knowledge of running an e-commerce store. And starting an online store to sell Notion templates seemed like a good idea.
And the experience taught me a lot.
Here are the three things I have learnt from the experience:
Making The First $1 Is Easy, But Sustaining It And Getting To The First $10k Is a Journey In And Itself.
It’s a big milestone when someone reaches their first $10k in their e-commerce store business.
The journey from your first dollar to the first $10k is filled with challenges and things you must learn to reach that milestone.
People open digital businesses and online stores and hope a pretty penny that it gets successful one way or another, but the reality is far from it.
You must constantly set up workflows and tweak and improve them with the data you collect from running your business.
You have to experiment with things once you dream of running a successful business.
Are you not getting new downloads on your freebies?
Join FB groups in your niche to promote them. Plug in your freebies everywhere you are posting content on social media.
Are people not buying from you because they don’t trust you?
Host Twitter spaces to gain authority in your niche.
Don’t know what a welcome open sequence does for your email list?
Put your sleeves up, get your hands dirty and figure it out. Find out how to set up a simple automated welcome sequence for your online business.
If you do this, in the future, you will thank yourself for taking action.
No One Can Help You With Running Your Business, But Yourself
This is the thing that I don’t see many people talking about online. No one can help you with running your business but yourself.
You are the person who will take action and set up things to run your business.
You can take fancy workshops and invest in $10k/month mentors to learn the best strategies and ideas that can skyrocket your business, but it won’t work unless you put these strategies in motion.
Also, a word of caution. Not everything your mentor says will work for you and is applicable to you.
If you’ve found a good mentor who is actually getting the results he keeps talking about, you’re in good hands.
Still, you’re the one who makes crucial decisions in your business that make or break it.
So, what is it going to be?
Either you implement the strategies or watch others implement them.
Don’t Follow Someone Else’s Marketing Strategy To The T. Make Your Own.
You might have heard this advice numerous times from these internet gurus: Don’t reinvent the wheel.
But it may so happen that something that is working for someone else might not work for you at all.
For someone, giving away their paid products as free will generate quality leads and generate more subscribers to their email list.
When it comes to you, you might get a lot of freebie seekers who will never purchase from you. (This happened to me in real life.)
This is where the problem arises when you try to fit someone else’s clue in your jigsaw puzzle. It might fit somehow, but barely. And you always feel like something is wrong, but you’re unable to pinpoint what it is anyway because you’re blinded by the fact that “it has been a successful business strategy for others. . .so why not me?”, but know that it might and it might not work out for you.
The answer to this problem is to experiment the heck out of your business and tweak things if they don’t work for you.
And reinvent the wheel a lot.
You might happen upon something you’ve never seen before. And it might even be a better fit for your business.
Conclusion & Breakdown
Never rush into starting your business, but do your ardent research about what you have to do after you do start it.
Learn the ins and outs of several marketing strategies. This step will help you make your first $1 and then the next.
But always think about how you can simplify it by tweaking your processes.
Tweak it in three areas:
- Sales
- Marketing
- Email Lists
You can choose your own 3 areas, but I’m going with this because I focused on this for the first eight months of my business.
And never give up.
Running a business is hard and complicated, and it’s a long-term game, and you need to learn a lot along the journey.
Don’t listen to people who say ‘it is easy’ since they are actively lying to you. They hope that they can sell you their stuff, or maybe they have built their business on random luck.
Also, remember this, businesses built on random luck aren’t sustainable because luck runs out in the end.
But if you know how to build a business from scratch, you can take that knowledge and start 3 more businesses and capitalise on that success.
Instead, research and set up your own systems so things work out for you.
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